Education

Wednesday

Michael Gove

BBC bias & Bridget ‘Philistine’s’ war on education

50 min listen

This week: a crisis at the BBC – and a crisis of standards in our schools. Following the shock resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, Michael and Maddie ask whether the corporation has finally been undone by its own bias, and discuss how it can correct the leftward lurch in its editorial line. Then: Labour’s new education reforms come under the microscope. As Ofsted scraps single-word judgements in favour of ‘report cards’, could this ‘definitive backward step’ result in a ‘dumbing down’ that will rob the next generation of rigour and ambition? And will ‘Bridget Philistine’s’ war on education undo the positive legacy of the Conservatives on education? And

Thursday

Theodore Dalrymple

The folly of psychology

A young Chinese girl, at school in an English-speaking country, approached me after I gave a talk at a conference and asked for my advice about what she should study. I knew nothing of her, except that she was pretty, with beautiful dark eyes, and was almost certainly of high intelligence. I was touched by her naive assumption that I would answer benevolently and in her best interests. It suggested that she had not yet encountered much of human malignity. ‘What are you interested in?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking of history and psychology.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘definitely not psychology, at all costs not psychology.’ My answer emerged spontaneously, without

Thursday

The Spectator

The failure of Britain’s elite universities

Politicians, authors, priests and the occasional Spectator editor have all served as the Oxford Union’s president over its 200-year history. Few among them would know what to make of George Abaraonye. The debating society’s president-elect faces disciplinary proceedings for celebrating the killing of Charlie Kirk. Upon hearing of the conservative activist’s assassination – some four months after the pair had debated in person – Abaraonye posted ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool’ on social media, along with other excited expletives in a WhatsApp group chat. He deleted the remarks but defended making them. Something is rotten in the state of Oxford when its chief debater celebrates the murder of a free

Thursday

Gus Carter

The false economy of cutting the Combined Cadet Force

What could be more fun for a 14-year-old boy than messing about in the woods with a gun? My school’s Combined Cadet Force offered precisely that, marching us through the Brecon Beacons and organising mock skirmishes with SA80 rifles (albeit using blanks). When we weren’t trying to shoot each other, we were fighting over OS maps and compasses, trying to find which bit of woodland we were supposed to be sleeping in. One group found a dead body on the side of a Welsh mountain. Another spent an evening drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes with a strange man in a caravan. At some point in the small hours, he got

Lara Brown

Should boarding schools be phone-free?

No development has shaken up the cloistered and carefully controlled world of English boarding school life quite as much as the invention of the smartphone. Traditionally, schoolboys might write home once a week. Perhaps they might be able to smuggle in a dirty magazine or other contraband, but for the most part boarders on school grounds were safely tucked away. Today, thanks to smartphones, children are sent to school with access to pornography, internet chatrooms and easy contact with their parents. What horrors might a group of 13-year-olds get up to in a dorm if left unattended with internet access? Should boarding school children be permitted to phone home each

Jo Thomson

The independent schools crisis is only just beginning

Ever since the sudden and cruel imposition of VAT on independent school fees at the start of the year, much of the media focus has been on the number of school closures. The first to go have been prep schools and schools in rural areas far from London and the south-east. Trust me, this is really only the beginning. Savvy parents have always known a reduction in those shiny buildings won’t matter that much in the end Only a very small number of independent schools will be completely immune from the current financial pressures and – in the next couple of years – that will start to become increasingly obvious.

Harry Mount

Vivat the Latin motto

In the strange, arcane world of school mottoes, it’s fitting that the most famous one of all belongs to a fictional school. Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus – ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’ – is the motto of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. J.K. Rowling brilliantly realised that children aren’t put off by boarding schools and the ancient rituals that go with them. They’re gripped by these peculiar places, their roots twisting back through the mists of time. And no school custom is as ancient or beguiling as the Latin motto. My motto, at Westminster School, was Dat deus incrementum – ‘God gives the increase’. It is a motto

Eleanor Doughty

How boarding schools reinvented themselves

Early in his time at Eton College, 13-year-old William Waldegrave, the school’s future provost, was struggling to sleep. He told his dame, and she in turn told the housemaster, John ‘A.J.’ Marsden. The former commando in charge of the boys told Waldegrave that if it happened again, he should knock on his door. A few nights later, the boy did as he was told. Marsden had a solution – they would go for a run, to Bray, seven miles from Eton. Waldegrave slept better that night. Tales of public schools past are legion – some better than fiction, and plenty that have inspired it. Others are less appealing, more appalling.

Anastasia Broder

Long live eccentric school traditions

On every Shrove Tuesday since at least 1753, boys at Westminster School have gathered in the hall for a mad scramble over a pancake. The Pancake Greaze (pictured) is a cherished tradition that sees one pupil crowned the winner for grabbing the biggest portion, which the cook tosses into the centre of the hall from a height of 15ft, as the rest of the school cheers on. The champion is awarded a golden coin by the Dean of Westminster, accompanied by the headmaster and sometimes royal visitors. The more unsavoury part of the tradition – nominally beating the cook with Latin primers if he fails to get the pancake over

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Lancing College, West Sussex Lancing is a public boarding school for children aged 13 to 18 in West Sussex. Set within the South Downs National Park, it offers an open-air theatre, a state-of-the-art music school, an equestrian centre and even the tallest school chapel in the world. As impressive as its facilities, though, are its alumni: Evelyn Waugh, Sir David Hare and Lord (Stephen) Green to name but a few. Nowadays, many students at the college – where fees start from £12,602 – come from its sister preparatory schools in Hove and Worthing. Also arriving this month is a new headteacher, Dr Scott Crawford, who will replace Dominic Oliver after

Philip Womack

Why do people feel sorry for me for going to boarding school aged nine?

Sometimes, when I’m chatting about childhood, at some point it will become clear I went to a boarding school from the age of nine. Reactions can be comical. ‘You poor thing!’ an interlocutor might gasp, gripping my forearm, no doubt picturing cold showers and cruelty. I’ve always responded with bemusement, since my experience largely featured comfort and crumpets. I loved my prep school – Dorset House in West Sussex. It was a world in itself, enclosed and beguiling. In some ways it was unchanging, such as the graffitied Latin primers which were the same our grandparents had used. Yet it could be surprisingly forward-looking, as when it made a satellite

Sunday

Matthew Greenwood

English schools are failing disadvantaged children

Education should be the great equaliser – the ladder with which all children, regardless of circumstances of birth, can improve themselves and, by doing so, climb towards a more prosperous future. It was certainly that way for me. I loved learning, and my state education took me from humble beginnings in Clacton-on-Sea to working in Westminster. Fixing this system will not be politically easy … but political difficulty is no excuse for inaction But not all children are so lucky. Despite England’s significant success at raising overall attainment over the past decade, the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils has stubbornly remained – despite the significant sums of money spent

Saturday

Amanda Spielman

Amanda Spielman on the SEND row and Labour’s Ofsted blind spot

22 min listen

As Labour looks to get a grip on public spending, one rebellion gives way to another with the changes to the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system threatening to become welfare round two.  On this week’s Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots, Lucy Dunn is joined by The Spectator’s Michael Simmons and former Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman to explore what the government is planning – and why so many Labour MPs are worried. Is the system failing the children it’s meant to support, or simply costing too much? And can Labour afford to fix it without tearing itself apart? Listen for: Amanda on the unintended consequences of the 2014

Monday

Tim Shipman

Keir can’t catch a break

13 min listen

Keir Starmer will have been hoping for a more relaxed week – but he certainly won’t be getting one. He is facing a fresh rebellion over support for children with special educational needs (SEND), which threatens to become welfare 2.0. The plan involves overhauling the SEND system and it’s another case of Labour MPs exclaiming that they didn’t stand on a Labour ticket just to target the most vulnerable in society. The main concern among backbenchers is whether it should be legally enforceable for parents to ensure their children receive bespoke support. Elsewhere, all roads lead to the Treasury, as Neil Kinnock has a solution for increasing Rachel Reeves’s headroom:

Thursday

Philip Womack

We’re losing the ability to read

A recent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don’t read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’. The study’s subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you’d think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you’d be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Lily Parr and the creepiness of AI resurrection

I’m not sure it’s possible to make a horror movie more sinister than the chirpy four-minute film on YouTube purporting to be an ‘interview’ with the late Lily Parr. Parr was a professional footballer who played as winger before the war, a chain-smoking 6ft Lancashire lesbian with that gung-ho spirit I remember from my girls’ boarding school, before the governors purged the spinster games mistresses. Three UK in collaboration with Chelsea FC have cooked up an AI version of Lily, which they insist can answer questions just as she would have done. They’ve persuaded Karen Carney (real, not AI), who played for England, to talk to AI Lily and then

Monday

James Heale

Can the Tories save their education legacy?

13 min listen

Bridget Phillipson’s schools bill is back in the Commons today. The scope of the legislation is twofold: firstly, looking at the welfare of children in schools and secondly at fundamentally changing the landscape of secondary education by doing away with academies (and with it the legacy of the previous Conservative government on education). The plan has been read by many – including former head of Ofsted Amanda Spielman, who joins today’s podcast – as Labour pandering to the unions and perhaps even prioritising the adults (union members) over the children. Amendments to the bill will be debated this afternoon, including a Tory amendment that would ban phones in schools, although it

Saturday

Colin Freeman

Colin Freeman, Harry Ritchie, Max Jeffery, Michael Gove and Catriona Olding

35 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Colin Freeman explains how Islamic State tightened its grip on the Congo (1:23); Harry Ritchie draws attention to the thousands of languages facing extinction this century, as he reviews Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages by Lorna Gibb (8:00); Max Jeffery highlights the boxing academy changing young lives (13:20); Michael Gove reflects on lessons learned during his time as education secretary (20:30); and, Catriona Olding introduces the characters from her new Provence-based memoir club (29:27).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Ludgrove, Berkshire Ludgrove, which was founded in 1892 by the footballer Arthur Dunn, is a boarding prep school in Berkshire and has 130 acres for its pupils to learn, run around and play in. The school is one of the last preps to provide full boarding (which is fortnightly). At weekends, boys can use 11 football pitches, four tennis courts, two squash courts and a nine-hole golf course. It’s not just Prince William’s alma mater: other old boys include Alec Douglas–Home, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Bear Grylls (who opened the new Exploration Centre in June 2021). Most of the boys go on to Eton, Harrow, Radley or Winchester. The headmaster,

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Why I’ve never forgotten Sister Cecilia

It is never people, always buildings. Faces change, time blurs them, but – unless they undergo a complete makeover – buildings remain pretty much the same, bar a few coats of paint. Along the second-floor corridor lined with arched windows that overlook the street. Buses grind by below. Up the last short steep staircase and along the very top corridor, which is narrower and lined with books. They call it the library and I am often here, tucked into the window seat reading, but otherwise heading for the arched door – everything is arched here – at the far end. It opens on to a low-ceilinged room with roof lights